After 12 years of creating dance, commissioning work from world-class choreographers, and opening a theater and studio in a converted mechanic's shop, former Martha Graham principal dancer Jeanne Ruddy announced Monday that she was folding her Philadelphia modern dance company.
"I came to the decision that it was time for me to move on, and that I had done what it was that I had set out to do," Ruddy, 58, said in her office at the Performance Garage on Brandywine Street.
She paused frequently to get her emotions in check, and drew her long, dark-blond hair up in a clip several times, before pulling it down again moments later.
"I've had cycles in my life. I was a decade with Martha Graham. Then I was nine years on the faculty of Juilliard and Ailey. And then I started this cycle, and it's 12 years now, and I want to go on to doing individual artist projects, and I'd like to be able to accept guest-artist invitations. I had some writing projects I'd like to return to."
Ruddy said her decision, which she mulled for 18 months, had nothing to do with the health of either Jeanne Ruddy Dance or herself, both of which she described as strong.
But the company was born out of her own brush with mortality. In the summer of 1999, she created and performed Significant Soil, which in its first incarnation was a solo - a lifeline after she was treated for breast cancer the year before. By December, she had filed paperwork to start Jeanne Ruddy Dance.
"There was a very strong feeling in me that if I got past the cancer, that I hadn't finished the exploration of the choreography that I had always been extremely interested in since I was young.
"But once I went to New York and I was in the Graham company, though I did do some choreography there it was a complete dedication to your work with Martha. It was absolutely, totally absorbing to be a member and then a principal dancer with Martha. The travel, the lifestyle, the hours - it really left little time for much of anything else, including relationships, having anything extra in your life."
Her own company is similarly demanding.
